‘Tis the season to be planning…

Have you laid out some plans for this year yet? How a plan for this week, or even today?

This time of year is often really good for crafting plans and setting up our agendas across short, medium and long term time frames. It’s an opportunity to think about what you want!

Before things get too crazy and you’re hopping from one emergency to the next, it’s great to assess what you really want. This might be in your life overall, or your career, or within your current job. Deciding what you want to work toward can create some excitement for the year ahead, and this is the perfect time of the year to put some frameworks in place.

Turning these wants into plans and realities is where the difficulty lies. As I mentioned in last week’s blog post ‘Set it and don’t forget it’ – it’s easy to underestimate the effort and time it will take to achieve certain goals that we set ourselves. In fact, time is always the thing that stops us doing more.

With limited time we always have to make a choice – and your planning must always take into account how long you expect something to take. For everything I do within m.a.d.woman, I like to include a little wriggle room where possible.

If you are making a plan to becoming healthier and including an aim to run an event like a city marathon later in the year you need to be really clear on your commitment to your goal.

A goal like this will take weeks of scheduled training, so make sure you allocate your time accordingly! If you also want to improve your career aspects by taking on some part time study, then keep in mind that you won’t have as much time to train!

Faraway goals written as ‘line items’ can often sound simple but it is so easy to underestimate the time and effort required when you’re in the low stress mode of the first month of the year. Also, don’t be too rigid with your planning as things can and will occur unexpectedly! It’s the windows of opportunity that I love the most.